Blacktalon: First Mark

by Andy Clark

  Cresting the stairs, Neave burst out onto the gantry that hung above the chamber. She slammed straight into one of the begoggled foe, who gaped for a split-second before her axe swept his head from his neck. The man fell, neck stump jetting a snotty fluid that squirmed with white worms.

  ‘Sigmar’s hammer, these filthy creatures are rotten to their cores,’ yelled Neave angrily, kicking the swaying body in the chest and sending it toppling over the gantry rail.

  A quick glance over that barrier confirmed her suspicions. The enemy had indeed opened the sluices of the vats lining the chamber’s walls, releasing a tide of diseased effluvia. She saw sylvaneth corpses bobbing like driftwood amidst the rank juices, dissolving and deforming under their effects.

  Yet there were far fewer fallen than Neave had feared; she heard the footfalls of dozens upon dozens of sylvaneth pouring up the steps behind her. At the same time, the masked servants of Nurgle spun at her, raising their rotwood javelins and hefting wax-stopped death’s heads.

  ‘What now?’ asked Katalya, pressing close at Neave’s shoulder.

  Neave pointed with one axe towards an archway that led off the gantry at the chamber’s far end.

  ‘Now, we fight our way to that. Get ready, Kat. The real battle’s just beginning.’ Neave launched herself into a lightning-fast charge, and the blood of Nurgle’s servants fell like rain.

  Lord Ungholghott marched between the fleshpens of the third foulebastion. Pitiful cries rose on all sides from the flesh-stocks. Hands clawed weakly through the iron bars, their skin thick with buboes and sores.

  Ungholghott’s normal fascination with his cattle’s suffering was eclipsed by his towering anger, which he vented upon the gaggle of champions and lieutenants who trailed behind him.

  ‘How precisely did the specimens evade the trap?’ he snarled. ‘Explain it again, as though I were as witless as you.’

  ‘My lord, it was the Stormcast,’ hissed Yurkhling, his yellow eyes staring from beneath his rotting cowl. ‘She threw herself beneath a portcullis and halted its fall.’

  ‘She is crushed, then? Her inner workings fouled and her hide torn and spoiled?’ snarled Ungholghott. ‘Wasteful and incompetent.’

  He stopped and turned at his underlings’ awkward silence.

  ‘The subject endures?’ asked Ungholghott, raising one leprous brow.

  ‘Lord, even now she is leading the surviving woodland savages along the upper galleries.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Ungholghott. ‘And she is coming this way then, yes?’

  ‘We shall stop-halt her, oh most munificent herald of unholy woes!’ chittered the Plague Priest representing Ungholghott’s Clan Feesik allies. He still hadn’t bothered to memorise the creature’s name.

  ‘You failed to stop her and her rag-tag band of woodland shrubs from slinking unseen into my fortress,’ said Ungholghott, his voice thick with scorn. ‘As I understand it, they walked right through a wound that your clumsy burrowing opened in the first place. And now you would have me place trust in the inferior mental processes and slinking fur-covered sacks of sinew that permitted this transgression in the first place?’

  The Plague Priest quailed, flinging itself onto its face and waving its tail wildly back and forth.

  ‘Trickery, grand and most gruesome one! Lies! Plot-schemes of those who would–’

  ‘Oh, by Nurgle’s feculent innards, I cannot listen to any more of this drivel,’ snarled Ungholghott, gesturing to Grungholox. The Plague Champion’s huge cleaver fell, bisecting the Plague Priest in a messy spray. The two halves of the rat-man flopped into his spilled innards, fluids squirting up to drench the wretches trapped in the pens on either side.

  Ungholghott took a calming breath. He closed his eyes and leant upon his staff, thinking quickly. Self-reproach stung him, for he saw now that he had been hugely arrogant. Familiarity with his old sylvaneth foes had clearly bred contempt, and Ungholghott had sorely underestimated the Stormcast warrior that accompanied them. Who or what she was, he didn’t know, but he was more interested than ever to slide her body into the bone-threshers and pick her apart.

  First, though, she had to be stopped, and Wytha as well. He couldn’t risk the possibility that the old woods-crone actually was carrying something that could harm him. Ungholghott was close to unleashing his might upon the Jade Kingdoms, and he would not fail Nurgle by allowing his own ego to undo things now.

  ‘Yurkhling, muster the Poxmonger Guard and the Fly’s Sons, and lead them in through the undergalleries,’ he ordered. ‘You will be the gutting hook that drags the innards from our enemies’ cavities. Grungholox, have the alchemancers mass their labour gangs and hurl them into the invaders from all sides. Tell them that any and all weapons may be deployed to stop the attack. Then lead the Sevenfold Faithful up the ungodly stair and attack through the septic sluices. Catch them in their flank and pen them in the old laboratories. You shall be the flensing blade that pares skin from bone.’

  Ungholghott’s two warlords saluted and hastened away, leaving a gaggle of lesser seers, sorcerers and champions standing awkwardly around the twitching remains of the Plague Priest.

  ‘Don’t just stand there, you thrice-damned idiots!’ roared Ungholghott. ‘Rally your warbands and attack! Overwhelm the enemy, unpick them like a stitched wound, and bring me the weapon and the Stormcast specimen!’ He gestured to the dead skaven. ‘And for Grandfather Nurgle’s sake, someone bring me a replacement for that. We’ll need the sub-vermin in this fight too, useless though they are. They’ll keep the enemy restrained long enough for us to open them up and pull them apart.’

  Ungholghott turned away from his underlings as they fled his presence. He completed his walk between the fleshpens and into the region of the fortress that he thought of affectionately as his zoo. He stood on a platform of iron and sinew, and looked down upon the huge metal pens below. Huge things moved in the gloom, slamming themselves against the walls of their cages and roaring in multitudinous voices, both bestial and horribly human. Tentacular limbs lashed. Fluids sprayed into the air, spittle and pus spattering the platform’s edge. A ripe stench rose thick as smoke from a bonfire, animal sweat mingling with the sweet corruption of decay and the acrid tang of dark alchemy.

  ‘It is time for you to show your strength, my pets,’ said Ungholghott, moving his hand towards a bank of heavy brass levers nearby. ‘I have rewoven your flesh into the mightiest of forms. Make the Plague God proud…’

  Neave ducked as a massive axe whistled over her head. The blade slammed into the meat of the chamber’s wall, and foetid fluids sprayed. She replied with a thunderous underhand swing, ripping her blade up through her enemy’s helm and sending the Blightking tumbling backwards. Neave flipped back away from her enemy’s corpse, lashing out and beheading two more foes as she sailed between them, before landing in a fighting crouch and assessing the fight.

  The sylvaneth had fought their way through several chambers since Ungholghott’s failed ambush, flowing along swaying iron gantries and butchering the plague worshippers that tried to stop them. Wytha raged, her furious screeches sawing through the air above the fight as she directed her warriors against the foe. Two of her Branchwraiths had been caught in the diseased deluge along with dozens of the forest spirits they led. Now Wytha seemed determined to exact a blood price for every last one. Her sickle-stave swept in vicious arcs, lopping heads and limbs, opening chests and guts. Here and there, where a sylvaneth fell slain, Wytha would pause and gently remove the lamentiri from her charges. She secreted the glowing soul-seeds in a woven reed pouch, and Neave knew that the Branchwych would plant them afresh in the clan’s soulpod groves should she survive the battle.

  That was by no means certain, however. The invaders were making steady progress, following Neave’s unerring sense for her prey, but fresh waves of foes appeared by the moment. The battle was currently strung out, the sylvaneth rearguard
fighting a tide of chittering skaven along the gantries of the previous chamber while Neave led a spearhead push through a rotting-meat chamber full of metal sluices and alchemical tanks.

  Their enemies were many and strange, from goat-like beastmen with matted fur and diseased hides to apron-clad plague cultists, lumbering Blightkings and gibbering mutants who struck with talons, pseudopods and stingers.

  Several of the rank creatures flung themselves at Neave, trying to overwhelm her.

  ‘Praise Lord Ungholghott, foulest of filthbringers!’ gurgled the largest of them, before Neave eviscerated him.

  ‘All hail mighty Nurgle, bounteous lord of generosity!’ shrieked another before she took his head from his shoulders.

  Neave had hacked down so many Chaos-worshippers that heaps of their corpses lay in her wake. Yet still they came on, and beneath their constant onslaught, the sylvaneth fell one by one.

  Neave saw a death’s head tumbling through the air towards her. It was struck by a blast of green energy, detonating prematurely and splattering its infectious contents across a band of mutants. She glanced gratefully at Katalya, who nodded and clashed her vambraces fiercely together. The tribesgirl was pale and sweating, clearly suffering the ill effects of the plague-ridden environment she fought through. Yet she kept fighting all the same, keeping pace with Neave as best she could.

  Another wave of enemies rose up from the slime-filled sluices that vanished into cavernous holes in the right-hand wall. Their rusted armour dripped with filth and their flesh sizzled, but they roared war-cries and vaulted over the edges of the sluices, straight into the fight.

  ‘Wytha, your right flank!’ roared Neave, gesturing with an axe.

  ‘They are witnessed,’ replied the Branchwych. ‘Ithary, Ulthyr, drive them back!’

  The Branchwraith keened with bloodlust as she left her mistress’ side, her talons spread wide and her thorned dreadlocks writhing. At her side strode one of Wytha’s Treelord bodyguards, who hefted his huge sword and let out a basso war-cry as he went. Maddened Spite Revenants followed them, fanged maws wide in murderous screams.

  The two forces clashed, Ithary’s thorn-magic peppering her enemies with projectiles as Ulthyr’s huge sword smashed like a battering ram through the Chaos ranks. Blightkings hewed barkflesh, Spite Revenants stabbed and lunged, dancing around their cumbersome foes as they hissed their hatred.

  ‘They are slowing us,’ said Katalya, sending punch-blasts of jade magic to shatter bones and pulp flesh.

  ‘They are,’ said Neave. ‘We need to contrive a way to force passage, or they’ll bottle us up here.’

  Wytha fought her way to their side, sweeping enemies out of her path with vicious fury.

  ‘We must push deeper, girl!’ she hissed. ‘The fragment is utterly deadly, but it must be triggered at the fortress’ very heart. Only in that way will we purge all foul fleshlings from this place!’

  ‘All?’ asked Neave.

  ‘All of our foes,’ said Wytha angrily, but Neave heard something else beneath her bluster. Wytha had slipped, she thought, just a little.

  ‘Wytha, what exactly is the weapon going to do?’ she asked, parry­ing the incoming strike of a mace, then cutting its wielder in half with a scissoring blow from her axes.

  ‘It will scour our enemies away with the undiluted magics of life,’ said Wytha. ‘But not if we fall here while flapping our jaws about its nature! You failed to reach Ungholghott once before, child. Will you fail me a second time?’

  ‘Don’t think me so easily manipulated, Wytha,’ spat Neave. ‘Battle presses, but you and I are not done speaking of this.’

  Neave turned her full focus upon slaughtering the foe. Still, her mind worked furiously. How dangerous or unstable was the weapon Wytha carried? Could her old mentor truly be trusted in her intentions? Before, Neave would have said perhaps. Now she wondered. She had caught the old Branchwych in a lie and it needled her. Neave glanced at Katalya, fighting bravely despite all the horror and danger she had endured. Would she survive proximity to Wytha’s masterstroke?

  ‘Sigmar, if you have guidance for your servant, now would be the hour,’ she muttered, side-stepping a spear thrust and hacking down the weapon’s wielder before spinning and striking, spinning and striking, then dodging away again to leave several more foes toppling dead to the ground.

  Neave caught a sudden commotion at the northern entrance to the chamber, the very archway she was fighting to reach. The Chaos-worshippers were surging, clawing at one another, yells of panic rising above their battle-chants and cohesion collapsing as they scattered.

  ‘Something’s coming down that passage,’ said Neave, and she thought of the prayer she had just offered up. The Shadowhammers had been close on her trail before she entered Wytha’s woods. If the aetherwings had stayed with her, kept her in sight during her confinement…

  Neave’s hope surged as blood sprayed out of the archway. A Blight­king corpse tumbled through the air to slam into his comrades. Several warriors turned and brandished their blades at the dark opening, while more scrambled over each other in their haste to get clear. Something moved in the shadows, and Neave began hacking her way towards the entrance with fresh vigour, keen to meet her comrades again.

  Her senses tingled. All her hope turned to ash. Wordlessly, she stepped between Katalya and the dark portal. A cacophony of horrible shrieks echoed from the archway before a tide of stitched and mutated flesh surged from its depths. Their wild eyes rolled. Cable-like sinews strained as they hauled vast bulks of muscle and flab into battle. Deformed talons ripped at stonework and bone, and slavering jaws gaped wide as Ungholghott’s abominations stampeded.

  Battering-ram limbs of bone swung, smashing Chaos-worshippers and sylvaneth alike through the air. Tentacles lashed out from bloated sacks of flesh and eyes, grabbing warriors and dragging them screaming into pulsating maws.

  The abominations smashed their way through the fight, some barely larger than Neave herself, others enormous monstrosities that trampled forwards on dozens of mismatched limbs. Neither Ungholghott’s forces nor Wytha’s could stand against the creatures. Though several abominations fell to talons and blade-strokes, more of them burst into the chamber by the moment. A Treelord vanished under the squirming bulk of a slug-like thing larger than a house, his blade puncturing it through and through even as its hundreds of pseudopods gnawed him away layer by layer.

  Wytha’s eyes burned blue and she cast out a hand, screeching a jagged invocation. The nearest abomination, a tangle of limbs and torsos and stitch-puckered eyes, shuddered as spiked branches erupted through its flesh. Wicked wooden spears tore the monster apart, leaving its fleshy components dangling from a forest of jags like a bloodshrike’s larder.

  ‘I will slaughter every one of these revolting aberrations!’ snarled the Branchwych.

  ‘You will not,’ said Neave. ‘You slew a single beast amongst a vast stampede against which we cannot stand fast. There’s no way forward here.’

  ‘They will fear the might of Dreadwood Glade!’ hissed Wytha, gathering her magics for another attack. Neave saw her falter as the full scale of the slaughter impressed itself upon her. Sylvaneth were dying on every side, and their enemies with them.

  ‘Soon there will be nothing left breathing in here but Ungholghott’s beasts,’ said Neave. ‘There’s another exit in the west wall. See it? I’m going to lead a breakout that way. Be ready to use your magics to cover us.’

  ‘There are hundreds of foes between you and that door,’ said Wytha.

  ‘I’ve killed hundreds more.’

  ‘Wait, there’s another way,’ said Katalya.

  ‘Where?’ asked Neave in surprise.

  ‘Low down, further back along the west wall. I saw them as we fought our way in. Tunnels like burrows.’

  ‘You’re sure, Kat?’ asked Neave.

  ‘When you spend yo
ur life as the prey as often as the hunter, you see boltholes,’ said Katalya. ‘But the bigger sylvaneth will not fit.’

  ‘We will have to leave some of our most powerful warriors behind, facing certain death.’

  ‘We will, but their sacrifice will mean victory,’ replied Wytha. ‘They will gladly give their lives as a rearguard to keep the clan alive. We will return for their lamentiri when these monsters are no more.’

  Neave narrowed her eyes at the Branchwych. Just how many lives was Wytha willing to sacrifice in the name of victory? she wondered. Would any of them survive Wytha’s vendetta, were she allowed to unleash her weapon? Neave knew she couldn’t allow the question to go unanswered much longer, but now was not the moment to settle things.

  ‘Kat, lead, I’ll get us there,’ she said. ‘Wytha, have your warriors follow.’

  With Katalya at her side, Neave hacked a bloody path across the embattled chamber. Sylvaneth and Chaos-worshippers and raging abominations clashed all around her, fighting with frantic fury and stumbling across a carpet of fresh corpses. All shape had vanished from the battle, leaving a meat-grinder in which there could be only one victor.

  As she cut her way through a tendril-lashing abomination and vaulted over its shuddering corpse, Neave caught sight of the burrow-tunnels Katalya had seen. They were puckered, like maggot-holes several feet across that plunged into the wall at ground level. Yet they were a means out of this death-trap. A way to continue her hunt.

  ‘Move, move!’ yelled Neave, hacking, dodging and leaping as she fought her way towards escape. Dryads and revenants came behind her, talons lashing.

  The last few foes were smashed aside. The way stood open.

  Neave glanced back to see Wytha’s Treelords bracing themselves against the enemy tide. The Kurnoth Hunters flanked them, blades and bows flickering as they joined the doomed rearguard action. Neave’s eyes met those of Ghyrthael for a moment, and he favoured her with a shockingly human smile. She saw the sadness and the courage there, and vowed that Ungholghott would not go unpunished for the deaths of such valiant warriors.